Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Yellow for Brad, gold for Cav?

FOR two weeks one wondered
increasingly whether Mark Cavendish had taken on too much. Whether the strain
of limiting himself to fetching and carrying, to helping his Sky team-mate Bradley
Wiggins to Tour de France triumph, would wreck his own chances of Olympic
glory.

And then, last Friday, came the last amazing kilometre of
the Tour’s 18th stage.

With Luis Leon Sanchez of Spain – one of his chief rivals
for Saturday’s Olympic road race crown – and Nicholas Roche way out in front,
there seemed no chance of the sprint finish that is Cavendish’s speciality.

This year, in Sky’s colours, he has not had a team dedicated
to leading him out for those sprints, as he had in previous Tours with HTC-Highroad.
But Sky did have the top two men in the race.

And there, suddenly, were those top two, the magnificent
Wiggins and his amazing sidekick Chris Froome, leading Cavendish into a
position from which he might – just possibly – win the stage.

Which he duly did with a breathtaking burst of power that
left Sanchez and Roche, who had thought they were contesting the finish, a
sudden 15 lengths behind.

It was not a normal Cavendish victory. But it was, in a way,
one of the most impressive of all his 23 stage wins.

After that, the emphatic nature of his fourth successive
last-day victory on the Champs Elysees was no more than we expected. And there
again was Wiggins, augmenting his own victory parade, by leading Cavendish out
into that final triumphant straight.

Those two rides were proof positive that the Tour has not
exhausted Cav but brought him in tip-top form into the Olympic challenge that
he has always said was his prime objective this year.

And that – even with nine circuits of a sapping Box Hill
circuit to negotiate – the Manxman is rightly the favourite for Saturday’s
gold.

He will have Wiggins and Froome on his side again, and this
time Britain’s first ever Tour de France winner will be there purely to help Cav’s
cause.

The co-operative spirit in the Sky team was one of the great
joys of this most joyous of Tours de France.

It is a huge testament to team chief Dave Brailsford that he
has brought together such individual talents – the Norwegian Edvald Boasson
Hagen is another who might have been a team captain himself – and got them
working so well together.

It is a fabulous thing for British cycling to have a Tour
winner, two years ahead of the ambitious five-year schedule Brailsford set when
Team Sky was formed in 2010.

To have a British one-two in Wiggins and Froome is almost
beyond a dream. Wiggin’s fourth place in 2009 was as good as it had ever been
for a British rider before.

This
year Wiggins has won Paris-Nice, the Tour of Romandie, the Critérium
du Dauphiné
and now the Tour. Brailsford wasn’t joking, or exaggerating, when he called it “probably
the highest sustained level of performance by any British athlete”.

It
would be no exaggeration, either, to describe Brailsford’s successes – first as
performance director of GB Cyling in Athens and Beijing and now with Sky on the
roads of France – as the highest sustained achievement of any British coach.

Like most high achievers, Brailsford makes it sound easy.

“It’s
all about doing the simple things better than anybody else,” he explains,
simply.

Having
built the best British teams ever on both the track and the road, Brailsford
now wants to make Sky the best cycling team ever.

First
there’s the matter of masterminding Olympic gold for Cavendish. Then one for
Wiggins in the time-trial. Plus of course a few on the track for Vicky
Pendleton, Laura Trott, Chris Hoy and company.

Simple.

THERE are two ways of looking at the
Olympics.

You can look forward eagerly to the greatest concentration
of the greatest sporting contests this country has ever seen. And wish it was
possible to watch more than the tiniest part of the action.

Or you can deplore the commercialism of what one commentator
has called “a £9billion promotion for the world’s worst companies”.

Which of these attitudes is right?

Both.

The aggressive protection of the Olympic “brand” and those
of its commercial sponsors and partners (no, I don’t understand the difference,
either) is even more deplorable than the fiasco over security. (Who ever
thought that a private company could be relied on to deliver all that’s
required there?)

For some the Olympic motto seems to be not “Faster, higher,
stronger” but “Richer, greedier, pushier”.

But none of that is the fault of the athletes who have
devoted so much of their lives to being the best they can be at just the right
moment.

You may not be able to take the “wrong” food into the
Olympic Park, drink the “wrong” beer, withdraw cash with the “wrong” card, or
even wear a shirt with the “wrong” logo. All of which is disgraceful and brings
both Britain and the Games into disrepute.

But you can relish the sport and cheer the team without
signing up to any of that nonsense.